Valve Software has made
available images for
SteamOS,
a Debian derivative aimed at providing a gaming experience built for the big screen.
This gaming operating system is based on Debian 7 (codename Wheezy).
Installation instructions are available from the
SteamOS website.
A dedicated page in
the Debian wiki lists additional information about this Debian derivative.

FOSSASIA is inviting Debian contributors and
fans to Phnom Penh, Cambodia for a Mini-DebConf from February 28 to March 2, 2014.
After previous events in Vietnam and a successful
Mini-DebConf 2010
in Ho Chi Minh City it is time to bring together some of the awesome Debian folks in the region
again and organise another Mini-DebConf: Phnom Penh 2014. The event
will be held at Norton University, the leading IT institution in
Cambodia, and will bring together a number of free software projects. Please
join us,
add
your name to the wiki, and spread the word!

Debian Women is proud to
announce
that
a
Mini-DebConf will be organised in Barcelona on 15-16 March 2014.
The idea behind the conference is not to talk about women in free
software, or women in Debian, but Debian subjects more inclusive for women.
Everybody is invited, but speakers are expected to be all people identifying
themselves as women.
Conference organisers are seeking proposals for papers, presentations,
discussion sessions, and tutorials.
If you have one or more proposals, send them to
proposals@bcn2014.mini.debconf.org.

Rebecca
Harms, co-president of the Greens/EFA Group in the European Parliament, announced
a
project to use trustworthy encryption in cooperation and dialogue
with European Parliament IT services and Debian.
Recognising that we live in a digital environment polluted by pervasive surveillance,
she sees encrypted software as a small first step to
ensure nobody but the intended recipent of an email can read it. Greens/EFA will
use a selection of Free Software from Debian running on regular consumer laptops.
As Greens in the European Parliament we are very pleased
that we are supported by Debian [...], a community of programmers and developers
abiding to a social contract to share and
maintain their common resource
which they call Free Software, she said.

Enrico Zini announced
that a list of known Debian contributors is available at
https://contributors.debian.org/.
The list will never be fully comprehensive, but it will try to be the
best effort Debian can possibly make to credit everyone, Enrico said.
The list is created from data sources
which can be added to take into account new types of contributions.
Please refer to Enrico's message for implementation details.

Niels Thykier sent some
bits
from the Release Team, with a precise timeline of events
that need to happen before the freeze for the next stable Debian release, Jessie,
which is scheduled for November 5 2014.
He also mentioned that the results from piuparts,
a tool to test installation, upgrade and removal of Debian packages, are now integrated
into Britney, the software taking care of the migration of packages from unstable to testing.

The update for Wheezy of the
Debian Administrator's
handbook, prefaced by Lucas Nussbaum,
the current Debian Project Leader, and Stefano Zacchiroli, Debian Project
Leader from 2010 to 2013, is
available
for download from the website of the book, or as the
debian-handbook
on Debian systems running unstable.

Niels Thykier
announced
that he has automated the reprocessing of packages in the Debian archive when
there is a new version of Lintian, a
tool to find bugs and policy violations in packages. Reprocessing the whole
Debian archive with Lintian 2.5.20 is expected to take about 3 to 4 weeks.

Do you want to organise a Debian booth or a Debian install party?
Are you aware of other upcoming Debian-related events?
Have you delivered a Debian talk that you want to link on our
talks page?
Send an email to the Debian Events Team.

According to the Bugs Search interface of the Ultimate Debian Database, the upcoming release, Debian Jessie, is currently affected by 476 Release-Critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 330 Release-Critical bugs remain to be solved for the release to happen.

Debian's Backports Team released advisories for these packages:
roundcube,
strongswan,
openssh, and
nbd.
Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.

Please note that these are a selection of the more important security
advisories of the last weeks. If you need to be kept up to date about
security advisories released by the Debian Security Team, please
subscribe to the security mailing
list (and the separate backports
list, and stable updates
list) for announcements.

Please help us create this newsletter. We still need more volunteer writers to watch the Debian community and report about what is going on. Please see the contributing page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at debian-publicity@lists.debian.org.